International Colloquium and Graduate Student Conference

 

Thursday 23 April 2020
Department of Philosophy
University of Antwerp

 

Deadline for submissions: 27 March 2020

 

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Writer and editor BENJAMIN MOSER

Author of the highly acclaimed biography Sontag: Her Life and Work (2019)

 

 

DESCRIPTION

Few people have grasped the attention of the public eye with as much intellectual pazzaz and moral seriousness as Susan Sontag. The publication of Benjamin Moser’s biography, wherein he successfully harmonizes the themes of her eclectic oeuvre with her bigger-than-life persona, seems like the ideal moment to take stock of these ideas in a contemporary context. What can we still learn from these ideas that were forged in a stark engagement with “[t]his world’! As if there were any other.”What has changed since then and how does this force us to rethink some of these ideas?

 

PAPERS
We invite proposals for papers and interventions on all aspects and dimensions of Susan Sontag’s work. We particularly welcome submissions that engage personally with the subjects at hand without losing sight of a philosophy that wants to describe and, dare we say?, change the way we live now.

 

Paper topics include, but are not limited to:

 

aesthetics, ethics, literary criticism, political activism, pornography, feminism embodiment and enactivism

 

– Trip to Hanoi: Philosophy outside of academia.

– On Photography: on Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and Instagram; We think we know what they are but what do they mean?

– Regarding the Pain of Others: Ethics and Aesthetics are one. But of course it                   is never that simple.

– An erotics of the Art!: How to deal with the arts in a world that pays     $120.000 for a duct-taped banana?

– The Aesthetics of Silence: Is there a politics of coming out?

– Illness as a Methaphor: The social aspects of diseases.

– Godot in Sarajevo: Humanism in wartime.

– Where the Stress Falls: The canon as cannon fodder?

– Style of the Radical Will: The aphorism as philosophical form.

 

We welcome submissions by graduate students and early-career researchers and artists. The conference will consist of a graduate student conference in the morning (partly in Dutch) and an international colloquium in the afternoon, centered around the keynote lecture by Benjamin Moser.

 

Please send 250 words abstracts together with a brief (50-100 word) biographical statement including affiliation, status (graduate student, PhD, faculty or independent scholar) and contact details to: michael.vanremoortere@student.uantwerpen.be.

 

CONFERENCE ORGANISERS
Michaël Van Remoortere, Mira Aluç, Laura Butzen, David Schoute & Liselotte van den Hout on behalf of the master students of the Philosophy Department of the University of Antwerp

 

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Katelijne Malomgré (Center for Ethics)

Yanni Ratajczyk (Center for Ethics)

Harriët Bergman (Center for European Philosophy)

Herbert De Vriese (Center for European Philosophy)

Eric Myin (Center for Philosophical Psychology)